Metaphase Read online

  He pushed himself cautiously to his feet. He felt damp and greasy. The curtains hung motionless.

  "Nerno!" he said through his link. "What's going on down here?"

  "Fresh air," Nemo said.

  Satoshi started to laugh. "That's more fresh air than I can handle all at once," he said. "This place is amazing -but do you mind if I leave before the next storm?"

  "I'll wait till you're safely away."

  "How long do I have? Can I look around?"

  "I must hold my breath."

  "Oh. Okay, I'll hurry."

  As he headed for the exit tunnel and the silken guideline, he took one last look around, at Nemo's lungs, at the symbiotic creatures who not only pumped air through Nerno's body but created the air as well.

  Stephen Thomas strolled after his lifeliner. When he was well out of sight of his partners, he stopped at the intersection of several tunnels. The creature beetled on and disappeared around a curve.

  Stephen Thomas deliberately turned down a different tunnel.

  He made it about a hundred meters. The lifeliner's carapace scraped the floor behind him as the creature scuttled after him, spewing thread. "Think you're going to stop me, huh?" Stephen Thomas said. "Just how the fuck are you going to do that?"

  It closed the gap, spinning out a lifeline of increasing slenderness and delicacy.

  "Stephen Thomas," Nemo said directly to the internal link.

  Stephen Thomas stopped. J.D. had adapted easily to

  direct communication. But Stephen Thomas wished he had brought a portable radio headset.

  "I hear you," he replied.

  "It's hard to follow you when you go so fast."

  "That's all right," Stephen Thomas said. "I won't get lost, I don't need a babysitter."

  "You do not wish to study genetics."

  "I-What?"

  "My attendant will take you to where you can study genetics."

  "Can I take samples?"

  "You have a sample."

  Great, Stephen Thomas thought. A few alien bacteria off a shred of string. They probably have as much relation to Nemo as E. coli does to human beings.

  "Thanks a lot."

  "You are welcome."

  "Oh, fuck it," Stephen Thomas muttered aloud.

  When the lifeliner went into reverse and trailed a thread parallel to the one it had left coming in, Stephen Thomas shrugged and followed the creature wherever it wanted to,take him.

  "Suppose I'd kept going," Stephen Thomas said to Nemo through the link.

  "I suppose you'd kept going," Nemo said.

  Stephen Thomas waited. Finally it occurred to him that Nemo had done exactly what he had suggested.

  "If I'd kept going," Stephen Thomas said, "what would you have done?" "Nothing."

  "Would you let me go anywhere I wanted?"

  "I'd warn you of dangerous spots."

  The lifeliner stopped in a gap among several curtains. Light shined out into the corridor, brighter than the light from the optical strands woven into the walls. The new light shimmered, like reflections from water.

  The lifeliner leaped, trailing silk, and disappeared.

  Stephen Thomas moved forward curiously. Warm, pungent air flowed toward him. Sulfur and hydrogen sulfide and other, more complicated chemicals made

  him breathe shallowly through his mouth. If the air got much worse, he would have to turn back. He tapped into the analysis of the LTM clinging to his pocket, and scanned the chemicals. None of them would kill him in their current concentrations. Not immediately.

  The curtains created a spherical chamber around and above a water-filled depression, and trapped the heat and the stench. Stephen Thomas stood on the bank, inspecting the place curiously. Sweat beaded on his forehead, on the back of his neck.

  The lifeliner's thread vanished into the oily, organic sheen floating on the pool. The light was so bright, the surface so obscured with rainbow brilliance, that Stephen Thomas could not see to the bottom.

  Nemo likes water as scungy as the air, Stephen Thomas thought. If I'm supposed to dive in after the lifeliner, forget it.

  He lifted the thread. Its end emerged, broken, from the water.

  Broken or dissolved, Stephen Thomas thought.

  "Hey, critter," he said aloud.

  The water shivered at his feet. He stooped down, expecting the lifeliner to answer his summons.

  The surface splashed upward, spraying him with the scummy soup. He shouted in shock and flung himself back, His feet slipped into the water. "Shit!" He jerked his feet back and scrambled for the entrance. He reached safety. He pulled off his shirt. The front and the arms were stained-he was glad that for once lie had worn a long-sleeved shirt and long pants-but the back was clean. He used it to wipe the liquid from his face and hands.

  The pale blue silk of his shirt discolored to brown.

  "Jesus, Nemo, what's-oh, fuck!"

  His sandals were smoking. He snatched them off and threw them into the corridor and rubbed his feet on the remnants of his shirt.

  "What's going on down here?"

  "Genetics."

  "Survival of the fittest?" I knew there was a good

  reason to study molecular genetics, he thought. "You told me you'd warn me of dangerous places."

  "But you asked to observe, not interact," Nemo said.

  "I didn't mean to fall in your damned pond."

  Stephen Thomas got the distinct impression that the squidmoth was laughing at him. Scowling, he sat crosslegged well above the waterline, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned his chin on his fists.

  The caustic liquid had not discolored the skin of his feet, or of his hands, even the delicate new swimming webs, so he supposed his face was not disfigured either.

  The splashing creature had submerged, unseen. But the surface roiled slowly, as if gentle whirlpools drifted across it, now and then colliding, mixing, separating.

  From the safety of the entrance, Stephen Thomas could not see what was going on. He rose and went cautiously nearer the edge. He bent just far enough to peer into the pool.

  The lifeliner burrowed into the bottom until nothing showed but its two scorpion tails. Dark blue filaments, slender at the root, wide and flat in the center, and tapered at the ends, grew from the bottom like kelp. They stretched toward the center of the pond. Just above the root, each bore a cluster of scarlet flowers.

  A tantalizing array of entities crawled and swam and burrowed among and below the kelp. Stephen Thomas wished he had a protective suit. He was not going swimming unprotected in Nerno's pool. He doubted even his spacesuit would help. It might keep out the noxious liquid and gases the pool was emitting . . . then fail catastrophically as soon as he entered vacuum. Another unfamiliar creature ploughed toward the lifeliner. It was shaped like a sowbug, but the size of Stephen Thomas's cupped hands. Several rows of spines ran down its back. They wavered, pressed backward as the creature crossed the muddy bottom.

  The spined sowbug lunged forward, straight between the lifeliner's extended scorpion tails. Silk burst from the tails, erupting onto the spines, and the tails flailed at the attacker. But the sowbug fastened on. Silt spewed up, obscuring the fight. Trails of yellow blood filmed the water. The lifeliner humped up out of its burrow, flexing its body spasmodically. One tail crushed a patch of spines. The sowbug shuddered, then clenched.

  The lifeliner relaxed and grew still. As Stephen Thomas watched, the sowbug bore down on it. It fell apart in battered pieces, leaking guts and golden blood.

  Stephen Thomas backed away from the pond. He felt sick. His vision blurred. He stumbled out into the corridor, fighting for breath.

  Don't throw up, he told himself. Not here, not now. Whatever you've seen, whatever it signifies, don't let it affect you.

  He grabbed his shirt and his sandals and fled from the soft vicious sounds of struggle.

  J.D. and Zev remained with Nemo.

  One of the armor-scaled creatures flowed up to Zev's bare foot and extende
d its frilly mantle, rippling out to touch him. Zev watched it curiously. Then, fearless, he picked it up and turned it over to look at it. Its feathery appendages waved frantically, and a stream of fluid spurted from its underside. Zev laughed. An old hand at catching creatures who used water jets and ink and even tiny poison darts for defense and escape, he had been holding it at an angle. The liquid jet missed him and spattered, pungent and oily, on the floor. Zev put the creature down, and it zipped off under one of the silk-sheet walls.

  Zev crossed the distance to Nemo. He knelt down and touched Nerno's sleek side, stroking the iridescent skin. Nemo blinked slowly. The long eyelid closed. Nemo reminded J.D. for all the world like a huge mutant cat being petted. The long tentacles moved languorously, tapping against the silk floor, the spinners, Zev's leg.

  Nemo plucked one of the honey ants and gave it to Zev, plucked another and handed it to J.D. J.D. ate hers

  slowly, preparing for the rush and dizziness. Zev popped his into his mouth and crunched it.

  "Oh, I like that," he said out loud, his voice breathy. He returned to using his link. "Thanks, Nerno! I wonder if you'd like beer."

  Nerno's long eyelid opened; the glittery eyes peered out. The long tentacles Surrounded Zev, touching and stroking him.

  "I eat only insubstantial food," Nemo said.

  Zev sat quiet and interested as Nerno's tentacles explored him.

  The tentacles touched and probed his body through the thin fabric of his shorts and shirt. Zev, not in the least uncomfortable, stroked Nerno's back and played his fingers along the shorter proboscises that formed Nerno's mustache.

  Nemo touched Zev's face with the tip of one long tentacle.

  "You have had your children."

  "Me?" Zev said, startled, yet flattered. "No, I've never been asked to father a child. Not yet."

  Nerno's short tentacles wuffled in a complex wave.

  "You're a juvenile."

  "I'm grown!"

  Nemo pulled the tentacle sharply back. Zev leaned toward the squidmoth and touched the purple fur.

  "I didn't mean to frighten you," Zev said.

  "Zev's an adult," J.D. said. "But divers wait till they're older, usually, before they reproduce."

  "Humans change to divers," Nemo said.

  J.D. was having trouble following Nerno's reasoning, though the insubstantial food made her feel intense as well as dizzy, able to make great leaps of intuition. Unfortunately, figuring out what Nemo meant, or what Nemo wanted to know, was too great a leap even for J.D.

  "Divers started out as human beings. But we changed ourselves. My grandparents did."

  "Divers are not the adult form of human beings."

  "No," J.D. said. "I mean, that's right. Humans can change to divers and divers can change to humans, but we usually don't."

  "I was never an ordinary human being," Zev said. "And we breed true. Diver genes are dominant. If J.D. and I had children, they'd be divers."

  "There's another difference between Zev and me," J.D. said. "Zev is male and I'm female."

  She was glad to have a relatively neutral way of bringing up the subject of sex and gender. Though Nemo had not balked at any of J.D.'s questions so far, she had felt shy of asking about the reproductive strategies of squidmoths. And though J.D. assured herself that a squidmoth would be shy of completely different subjects than the ones human beings found difficult and delicate, she did not find broaching the question of sex any easier. "Europa is a female and Androgeos is a male," Nemo said.

  "Yes. Exactly."

  "This is significant for your reproduction."

  "Yes. For us, and for most of the higher animals and plants on Earth. To reproduce, we need a male and a female. How does it work for you?"

  "We exchange genetic material, then save it for our reproductive phase." Male first, and then female, J.D. thought. Or hermaphroditic-Then: You're doing it again, she thought. Trying to fit Nemo into familiar terms. Just because you think you've pinned something down, just because you've named it, doesn't mean it fits in the box you've made of the name. "How often do you reproduce?" J.D. asked.

  "One time."

  "Do you have children, then? Young ones, offspring?" Nemo was a being of great age; J.D.'s impression was that Nemo was an elder of the squidmoths. "I have no offspring yet."

  "How do you decide when to have them?"

  "I decide when the juvenile phase of my life is finished."

  J.D. started to say something, then stopped, for she had been about to interpret Nerno's comment without double-checking her assumptions.

  "Do you mean that you decide when to become an adult-when to become sexually mature?"

  "I decide when to enter my reproductive phase."

  "Is that when you become an adult?"

  "Yes.,,

  "Are you still a juvenile?"

  "I'm still a juvenile."

  "I thought you were old," Zev said. "Older than Europa, even."

  "I am older than Europa," Nemo said.

  "And still a juvenile!" J.D. said, amazed.

  Maybe that's why Nemo's willing to talk to us, J.D. thought. Jusi a crazy kid.

  "Nemo, how long is your lifespan?"

  Nemo hesitated.

  I wonder, J.D. thought, if Nemo is afraid I'll say, "Take me to your mother"?

  "I'm nearly a million subjective years old," Nemo said.

  Some juvenile! J.D. thought. If Nemo's a juvenile, how old and wise the adults must be!

  "Did Civilization increase your lifespan, too, like Europa's?" J.D. asked. "Or do you naturally live a long time?"

  Again, Nemo paused before replying. Would the squidmoth start behaving like Europa and Androgeos, withholding information because it was valuable, and human beings had so little to trade for it? She could not bear to think that after all, Nemo would send the humans away.

  If everyone in Civilization is four thousand years old, a million years old, J.D. thought, no wonder they think of us as immature. But . . . do they have kids of their own? Europa gave me the idea there were a lot of different people out here. Where do they put their popula-

  tion? She wondered, feeling depressed, if the people of Civilization crammed themselves together, like human beings in some of Earth's cities, and comforted themselves by calculating how many people could be packed into a given area, and still have a spot of ground to stand on.

  "Civilization helped my people naturally live this long," Nemo said.

  "Do you build in a long life-span? Instead of prolonging it with outside treatments?"

  "More or less," Nemo said.

  "Who decides who gets to make those changes?"

  "With enough knowledge, you can change yourselves."

  J.D. sighed. "We'll have to discover the knowledge on our own, I'm afraid," she said.

  "When you come back, Civilization will give you another opportunity to ask for it," Nemo said.

  "We don't want gifts!" J.D. said. "Not now, not in five hundred years! We want partnership. We want friendship and communication." She stood up, too agitated to remain lounging on the soft silk floor. "I know it isn't very long-sighted to care that I'll be dead when we get another chance. But I do care! I want to see the interstellar Civilization for myself. Can't anybody out here understand that?"

  "I understand."

  Europa had referred to the squidmoths with contempt. J.D. thought Europa's assessment of Nerno's people was wrong. J.D. thought Nemo might know more about the inner workings of Civilization than Europa did, more about the power structure, more about the cosmic string.

  On the other hand, J.D. could not imagine Europa living anywhere for four thousand years-for one yearand not scoping out the power structure.

  "And . . . I'm selfish," J.D. said. "Now that I've met you, how can I go home and know I'll never get to talk to you again?"

  "I'll be sorry when our talks end, too," Nemo said.

  "They shouldn't have to, though, that's the point," J.D. said. "The nuclear missile was a mistak
e. Bad luck, and misunderstanding, and error. It wouldn't happen again in a hundred years. In five hundred! Especially if people back on Earth knew about Civilization."

  "The nuclear missile was bad luck," Nemo said.

  J.D. chose to interpret the expressionless comment as agreement, rather than as a question, or as skepticism.

  "I have to find the other people, Nemo. The ones who came before. I have to explain what happened, so they'll stop withdrawing the cosmic string." "There are no other ones anymore, J.D."

  J.D. sank down. Androgeos had said the same thing, but J.D. had stopped believing Androgeos when he tried to steal Victoria's transition algorithm. Hearing Nerno say the same thing shocked her. She trusted and believed Nemo.

  "How do you know? How can you know the other ones are gone?"

  "There haven't been any in a million years."

  "Maybe you Just never met any," J.D. said. "The galaxy's a big place."

  "Have you been everywhere?" Zev asked. Several of Ncmo's attendants had gathered at Zev's feet, snuffling at his toes, at his semiretractile claws. He petted them like kittens, like the baby octopuses the divers liked to keep around.

  "I haven't been everywhere," Nemo said.

  "So there might be some you don't know about." J.D. smiled sadly, but she felt hopeful again.

  "I don't think so."

  "We've got to keep looking. Maybe I'm too arrogant, but I think our people would be an asset to Civilization. And maybe I'm not arrogant enough, but I don't think our nuclear missiles are a threat to any of you. Even our military thinks interstellar war would be stupid and unwageable."

  "Stupid isn't equivalent to lacking destructive power," Nemo said.

  J.D. slumped, her hands lying limp on her knees. It was essential to her, even if selfish and simple-minded, to return to Earth with a successful expedition. She was terrified at what would happen-not only to her and her renegade colleagues, but to their whole planet-if they returned a failure. The rush of Nerno's insubstantial food had vanished, leaving her drained and shaky. She was too tired to think, too tired to talk. She could not remember the last time she had rested. She goosed her metabolic enhancer, but it too had exhausted itself.

  "Where do you come from?" Zev asked.